Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9)

by Glynn Stewart

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  “Well, that’s that, isn’t it?” Rin told a virtual conference of his senior people and Princess Oxtashah. “How long ago was the message transmitted?”

  “Thirty-seven hours,” Oxtashah told him. “We do not yet have Fleet Commandant Icenar or the Swarm on our long-range anomaly scanners. I have ordered Likox to send the escorts into hyperspace and maintain a watch there.

  “That should give us a half-cycle or so of warning before the swarm arrives.”

  “Lawrence, Mok.” Rin looked to his subordinates. “That means we’ll probably see them in about twenty to twenty-five twentieth-cycles. We have fifteen tenth-cycles at most.”

  “Are you ready?” Oxtashah asked. “Can you destroy the Swarm?”

  “The scanners and targeting software are ready,” Rin said after a moment’s consideration. “Or close enough, anyway. A few more linkages and a couple more hours of code. Targeting will be ready, but…”

  “But?” Lawrence asked.

  “Our ability to protect friendly ships is poor,” he admitted. “We’re going to be able to set up a link for Zokalatan and her escorts shortly that should protect them, but we can’t do it for the fighters.

  “I need an active hyperfold link to any ship we’re protecting, and we can only shield a few. Maybe fifty?”

  “The plan calls for the fleet to cut their interface drives on arrival in Skiefail,” Oxtashah told him. “If we can allow a portion to maneuver under the shield of the weapon, that may change the odds.”

  “If the weapon is working,” Rin said. He looked at the other two. “Lawrence?”

  “We’re there,” she said. She looked exhausted, like she hadn’t slept in days. “The first teleporter will be online in the next tenth-cycle. The second will be about a cycle after that, and we’re hoping to have one of the partial stations online. We may have that done by the time the swarm arrives, but it’s not likely.”

  “Two teleporters,” Rin said grimly. “So, a thousand shots?”

  “Roughly. We have to hope for one-shot kills, because I don’t think the bastards will be bringing less than a thousand bioforms,” Lawrence said grimly. “And I need to pull my people off the station before we initiate.”

  “Agreed,” Rin said instantly. “The odds of losing the teleporter stations are too high for me to want to keep people aboard. We’d lose them all.”

  “Will it help if someone stays aboard?” Oxtashah asked.

  “It might cut the odds of a failure by ten percent, get us another dozen or two shots,” Lawrence admitted. “But I’m not going to ask my people to die for that.”

  “No. But I will ask for volunteers from the Drones,” Oxtashah said grimly. “And we will remember their names for all eternity. That is always the deal.”

  “That…” Lawrence trailed off. “There are definitely people among your Drones who can do what we need. That just…goes against the grain.”

  “Your people live one way, Commander Lawrence,” Oxtashah told her. “Mine live our way. The only hope the Drones have for immortality is to be remembered. For this… For this, they would earn a thousand years if I had the power to give it to them.

  “But all I can give those shortest-lived of our children is a promise that their sacrifice will be remembered—and if their sacrifice can save millions, they will make it gladly.”

  “If they volunteer,” Rin insisted. He knew it was a feeble demand, but he had to make it.

  “Of course,” Oxtashah agreed. “We do not order our Drones to their deaths. Ever.”

  Rin exhaled a sigh and nodded.

  “Then it seems we may actually be ready when the Infinite get here,” he murmured. “Let’s hope it is enough.”

  “Just to confirm, there is nobody on those ships, correct?” Rin asked as his team settled in around him on the control station.

  A Wendira holographic display had been hooked up to the Imperial molycirc core that was actually running everything. Hybrid interfaces designed by the Taljzi but manufactured aboard Zokalatan linked the upside-down chandelier of molecular circuitry to the ancient Alavan systems.

  Only about a tenth of the Alavan computers were working, and Rin had no idea what proportion of the rest of the systems were online…except that it was enough. They had the scanners, they had the coms, they had the teleporters.

  They’d done it. In theory, at least—which was what the two ships now positioned a light-hour from the Skiefail Swarm were meant to test.

  “We have removed all of our personnel,” Castellash confirmed. “Both transports are standing by to activate their interface drives by remote command.”

  Rin nodded and checked his own reports. He’d commandeered Castellash’s two largest sublight ships and had them fly out to a designated zone.

  “Kelly, confirm the teleporter station is clear,” he asked. They’d have a skeleton crew of thirty-two Drone volunteers on each station when the real fight started, but there was no point risking anyone for the test.

  “Station is clear,” Lawrence replied. “All systems show green from here. You have the button, Dr. Dunst.”

  “Confirm, I have control,” Rin announced. He glanced around the room. They’d rigged up lights and systems at the heart of the Alavan station to make it more usable, but that somehow just made the black spires of the dead computers they hadn’t been able to restore more intimidating.

  A holographic image of Oxtashah watched from a communications console, and most of his team was scattered around the room, waiting for the word.

  “Targeting system is online,” he reported, entering the first commands. “Link to the teleporter is disabled. Neither ship is appearing. Boards are clear.”

  He waited a moment, double-checking everything.

  “Director Castellash, have the ships bring up their drives,” he ordered. “Let’s confirm these sensors are working.”

  They’d calibrated them on live targets, but they still had time to test everything. The second and third potential teleporters were still being worked on, but he wasn’t feeding those stations instructions—both the Alavan communicators and the new hyperfold setup had been physically disconnected, just in case.

  “Drives are online,” Castellash reported.

  “And I see them,” Rin replied as two icons appeared on his screen. The interface scanner operated in real time across a surprising range, picking up disruptions in the barrier between realspace and hyperspace.

  “I have the feed from Extana,” Rin continued. “Mapping the mask… Activating the mask.”

  One of the icons disappeared from his screen. If he’d done everything right, the Alavan computers now didn’t know Extana, the larger of the two transports, existed. A mask had already been in place around Zokalatan and her escorts, though the ships were close enough to the swarm to probably be safe and had their drives offline.

  “I am maintaining the mask. Drop both interface drives,” he instructed.

  The link from Extana changed as her sister ship disappeared from the scanner.

  “Everything looks good. I have a mask on Extana that should pick up automatically when she raises her drive,” Rin said grimly. “Time for the real test.”

  The room was silent as every gaze was focused on the hologram of the system.

  “Commander Lawrence, complete the connection, please,” he ordered.

  New icons flashed up on his screen and the main hologram, turning a bright green to declare that systems were operational.

  “All systems are green,” she reported. “Containment fields online. Everything for the teleporter shows green.”

  “Scans are green, control interface is green,” Rin concluded. He looked at the main display and the icons up there—the two transports, as their computers reported.

  “No reaction to Zokalatan or the escorts,” he reported. “Everything is quiet. Exactly as planned.”

  There was an audible sigh of relief. Zokalatan’s interface drive was shut down, a
nd she shouldn’t have triggered the station’s new defenses, even without the masking program. But the chance had been there, and that made this the most dangerous moment of bringing everything online.

  “We now know that a mask over an inactive drive works and that an inactive drive is fine,” Rin noted. He could theoretically stop masking Zokalatan and her escorts now, but why take the risk?

  “Castellash.” Rin paused as the Wendira looked at him, waiting for the order everyone knew was coming. “Bring up both transport drives, please.”

  Everything happened very quickly after that. An icon appeared on Rin’s scanners, and the ancient Alavan processes kicked into play. Parts of the “in-flight refueling” system had been modified to create a weapon, but most of those had been convincing the control computer to accept an interface drive as a ship.

  It detected a ship. It judged that it had not fueled that ship. It provided fuel. Icons flashed on the screens, reporting on the teleporter as it activated—and then the hyperfold com from the second ship cut off.

  “Target identified and destroyed in…eleven seconds,” Rin reported. “I am still receiving a feed from Extana. She is not showing as a contact on the scanners.”

  The room exploded in cheers. Both halves of the mission were complete: they’d built a superweapon and they’d found a way to protect their own ships from it.

  As the cheers carried on, Rin met Lawrence’s gaze. She looked grim and returned his regard calmly.

  “What next?” she asked.

  “We leave everything online and bring Extana in to the swarm,” he told her. “That will take two hours. If the mask works for the entire flight in, we’re good. Either way, we shut everything down when Extana is either here or gone.

  “Then we wait.”

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  “Anomaly scanners put the nearest contact at over a light-day,” Ort reported on Odysseus’s flag bridge. “We should be clear for a rapid-transition hyper portal.”

  “Isn’t that going to be fun,” Rogers murmured.

  Morgan had to agree. It was possible to create a hyper portal, pass through and close the portal behind you in under a second. But the portal didn’t have enough time to stabilize the way it normally did, which made the transition noticeably more uncomfortable.

  “Needs must when the devil drives,” Morgan murmured back to her XO. “Are all ships ready?” she asked more loudly.

  “Checking in now,” Ort confirmed. “Seventy-Three-Twenty-Two ships report ready.” Pause. “Wendira ships report ready. Laian ships report ready.”

  The Ivida turned in his chair to look at Morgan.

  “All special task group report ready for rapid hyperspace transition on your order,” he reported.

  Morgan considered the vague map for a few seconds. They could pick up the mass effect of the rosette clearly from there, rippling waves of anomalous readings on the scanners. They should be emerging between thirty-six and forty light-hours from their target star.

  And they should be clear to do so. Nothing was on the anomaly scanners except those stars and the one element of Swarm Delta at over a hyperspace light-day.

  But something made the back of her neck itch, and she was all too aware that she wouldn’t see any vessels lying doggo in hyperspace. There was only so much delay she could take, though.

  “STG will transit in sixty seconds from…now,” she ordered crisply.

  There was no grand “leap into action.” Her team had been planning for and expecting the order for days. Everything on her bridge was smoothly planned, and she hoped it was the same on the other ships of the special task group.

  A timer was now on her main hologram, ticking down toward zero, and Morgan forced herself to keep breathing normally. She hated rapid transitions.

  They weren’t that bad, not really, but they were supposed to be avoidable, and she’d made too many of them in her career.

  “Transition in ten seconds,” Odysseus’s navigator announced. “Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

  “Transition.”

  The world tried to tear Morgan apart, and she grimaced as that one second seemed to take an hour to pass. Her muscles clenched and seized in rippling waves across her body, and she gasped in pain.

  She was hardly the only one. Even as rapid transitions went, this was bad. She’d been through one worse, ever, and that had been inside the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula with damaged hyperspace emitters!

  “Transition complete,” Rogers reported, sounding short of breath. “All ships confirmed present. We are scanning… Range to target is one-point-six light-cycles.”

  Thirty-seven light-hours.

  “Well in the zone,” Morgan accepted aloud. “Full scans; I want to know what’s out there, people.”

  Her team set to work, interfacing with the individual ships as they moved toward the star at half the speed of light.

  “Stealth fields are holding across the task group; we remain invisible,” Ort reported. “Hyperfold coms are…distorted but functional.”

  “Get a team on analyzing that,” Morgan snapped. “If it will impact long-range hyperfold transmissions, we need to know that.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ort confirmed. He paused. “We’ll run the analysis, but it doesn’t look good, sir.”

  “Then we’ll deal with that,” Morgan said calmly. “All ships will maintain course toward Target Astoroko One for now. We were always going all the way in for this one.”

  She checked. One of the Laian starkillers was designated for this deployment. In another universe, the blue giant they were approaching would have gone on to tear a chunk of the Astoroko Nebula away with it as it fell out of the rosette, eventually giving birth to a new star system.

  In this universe, Morgan Casimir was going to kill it before it got to do that. That star system would die unborn to destroy the Imperium’s enemies.

  She was one of the few living sentient beings in the galaxy to have fired a starkiller, and she hated them more than anything else. But the nest of Infinite at the heart of the nebula was unfightable.

  “No contacts, scanners are clean,” Rogers reported. “There is nothing within several light-hours of us that our passives can pick up. Do we risk going active?”

  Morgan had to stop and think for that one. Even pulsing their tachyon scanners would expose them to anyone out there, but at the same time…passives missed things. Just distance and moderate emissions control could hide a starship from the STG’s passive sensors.

  And that was for a starship, let alone a bioform that could have entirely different emissions profiles from what they were used to.

  “Coordinate it,” she said quietly. “Spread out ships for maximum heterodyning, and go active on everything for a one-second pulse. Radar, lidar, tachyons—the full array.

  “I want to know the names of the local dust, clear?”

  “Yes, sir!” Rogers replied crisply. “On it.”

  Morgan watched and waited. Without the limits of the hyperspace visibility bubble, her ships spread out into a rough disk half a million kilometers across in a few seconds, linked together by their FTL coms.

  “Initiating synchronized active pulse…now.”

  The main hologram flashed gently as the tachyon pulse went out. Seconds passed as the FTL particles flashed across the dark void, leaving traces in the dark whenever they hit anything. Rocks. Dust. There shouldn’t have been much out there.

  And then the new icons started to appear on the screen. First just a handful as the tachyon pulse washed over what could have been a slowly forming asteroid belt…then dozens of icons as the pulse continued on.

  “Contacts, multiple contacts!” Rogers snapped. “Contacts in full em-con at one hundred twenty light-seconds!”

  For a moment, everyone on the bridge froze in stunned shock. There was no way there was an ambush fleet waiting for them there. They’d been stealthed all along and none of the forces and sentinels they’d passed had reacted to them.
/>
  The only way the enemy could already be there was…

  “They’ve been watching us all along,” Morgan said flatly. “They detected us as soon as we came into the nebula and projected our course. We’ve never been hidden.”

  “What do we do, sir?” Rogers asked.

  “Can we resolve numbers and types from the pulse we already got?” she asked.

  “Estimates only,” Ort told her. “I make it sixty-six contacts, led by at least one Category Six…potentially a Six-A.”

  “Understood.” Morgan looked at the hologram. “Assume Swarm Delta knew exactly where we were and re-vectored as soon as we transitioned. Can they position to cut off our retreat?”

  There was a longer pause as the operations team ran their analysis.

  “Yes, sir,” Ort said quietly.

  “Then we complete the mission,” Morgan told her staff. “Bring up the tachyon sensors for long-range targeting. All Seventy-Three-Twenty-Two units will engage the Six with hyperspace missiles.

  “Task group will commence a realspace run for Target Astoroko One,” she continued. “Even one starkiller threatens the Queen. They may be prepared to negotiate—and if not, the deeper we are in the gravity well, the more damage we can do to Swarm Delta when they come after us.”

  Even as she laid one plan aloud, though, Morgan was assembling her real plan in the back of her mind.

  There was a decent chance they could punch through the force in front of them and make a run into the rosette’s gravity well. They’d be a nightmare for the Infinite to dig out of that—which had a chance of bringing all of Swarm Delta in to deal with them.

  Swarm Delta’s three components were fifteen trillion tons of warships, with hyperspace drives and probably missiles and potentially even hyperfold singularity guns. If she could lure them inside the hyperspace dead zone around Target Astoroko One and then detonate the star, well…

  The special task group was already dead. If she could take fifteen trillion tons of Infinite bioforms with her and have a decent chance of hurting the Queen and the central nest, she was going to take it.